


how I climbed your city's walls

by strikinglight



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Long-Distance Friendship, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, and now everyone's waking up, barcelona was a long dream, not exactly welcome to the madness fic but boy is it sure in there
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-11
Updated: 2017-04-11
Packaged: 2018-10-17 15:59:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10597380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strikinglight/pseuds/strikinglight
Summary: The way Otabek says his name is different from any other voice he’s ever heard, and he’s convinced there must be more to that than newness. They’ve known each other less than a week, but there have been times—times he’s nearly lost his head over the sensation of somethingconnecting,the two of them meeting face to face, as much as a pair of almost-strangers can.Barcelona, and what comes after.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [themorninglark](https://archiveofourown.org/users/themorninglark/gifts).



> For Lark, who cares deeply about What Comes After.
> 
> I also have [Ny](archiveofourown.org/users/nylie) to thank for the plethora of Otayuri headcanons that are in this fic, as well as for the veritable gigantic vault of Otayuri headcanons that have yet to make an appearance in any fics but likely will in the not-so-distant future.
> 
> Title from Tegan and Sara's "I Was a Fool."
> 
> "Welcome to the Madness" did a number on all of us, man.

This is the shape an ending makes:

They are shaking hands at the boarding gates, up and down and back again, and Yuri’s wrist is beginning to seize up from the effort but somehow they can’t stop. They are between places—perhaps between lives too—but Otabek’s fingers are solid, strong where they squeeze the bones of Yuri’s hands together. If it seems like he can’t quite let go too, it must (must, _must_ ) be Yuri’s imagination.

“I’ll text you when I land,” he says, cocksure as always, though the sound in his ears is hollow.

“You have my number,” Otabek agrees. “Take care, Yuri.”

The way Otabek says his name is different from any other voice he’s ever heard, and he’s convinced there must be more to that than newness. They’ve known each other less than a week, but there have been times—times he’s nearly lost his head over the sensation of something _connecting,_ the two of them meeting face to face, as much as a pair of almost-strangers can.

(This morning in the hotel lobby Yuri had watched Phichit Chulanont say goodbye to Yuuri Katsuki—open his arms and loop them around Yuuri’s neck and pull him in, laughing, until they were holding each other cheek to cheek, standing in each other’s warmth. How certain they had looked, so used to this. So safe in the promise of a hello again, waiting somewhere just out of sight. Yuri had bitten his lip and looked away, but he can still feel the word that had bloomed on his tongue at the sight, bittersweet because foreign— _maybe this is what_ friends _means._

For his part Yuri already knows no one _he’ll_ ever meet will make him like _this,_ silly and bubbly and out of control, like a little kid in a grown-up-body, completely uncaring of all the parts that don’t fit quite right.)

For half a wild second he contemplates dragging at Otabek’s hand, leaning toward him across the gap, but—

“You too,” he says, remembering just how short the days have been.

 

* * *

  

“Deda,” Yuri mumbles into the heel of his palm. He’s watching the clouds, tinted somber blue-grey through the glass pane he leans his head against. “Can I open the window?”

Their passage home is steady as it’s always been. His grandfather’s car does not fly so much as shamble, does not roar so much as putter, old as the hills between the airport and the house. But it’s fine, Yuri thinks, as he cranks the lever and watches the glass come down. There is the chill he’s been searching for. It skims along the high planes of his cheeks and meanders through his hair.

The wind moves more slowly here too, slow as the deep winter is.

 

* * *

 

Otabek takes Yuri with him when he goes to return his bike, the morning they’re supposed to fly out.

The flights are booked for later that evening, an hour or so apart, but right now it’s nine AM and most of the city is still asleep. The early sun is warm on their backs as they cruise at a more or less civilized speed—for once—and Yuri sees fit to keep quiet about the possibility that Otabek might be taking more turns, might be idling at corners longer than is strictly necessary.

(He _doesn’t_ keep quiet about the old lady at the rental shop, though, who greets Otabek with “Good morning, _guapo,”_ and pats him effusively on the arm not once but _three times._ Otabek only chuckles and walks him across the street with his sleeve in one hand. To add insult to injury, he buys him a croissant and a cup of hot chocolate at the café on the corner before Yuri can protest.)

It’s a little easier, just at the moment, to pretend that they have more time than they do.

 

* * *

 

Sometimes he thinks his grandfather’s house is shrinking. The staircases are narrower, the ceiling lower, the distance from the refrigerator to the kitchen table traversable in fewer steps than he remembers. Even the couch in the living room, for all its familiar warmth, will be too short across for him soon. Already his feet are overshooting the armrest, dangling in the air. He needs to curl them in to fit them beneath the blanket draped over his legs—also too short now, but it’s the one he’s used on this couch all his life, and even he has the good sense to know you don’t simply give up something so precious.

They’re spending the evening with the TV on, not really watching—just letting some old soap opera fill the quiet while Yuri scrolls through his Instagram feed and his grandfather reads—and Yuri doesn’t even realize he’s drifting away until he feels a weathered hand patting his hair, lifting the phone from where it’s slipped from his grip and come to rest flat on his face.

“Sleep, Yurochka.”

When Yuri closes his eyes all his dreams are of a city where the houses are made of coral, the bones of the sea chambered and twisting, rooftops tiled with dragon scales. His dreams take him down the streets and up a flight of stone steps cut into the side of a hill, tiled in more colors than he knows the names of.

Always in these dreams it’s sunset, or a little before—the yellow sky that marks the softest hour of each day.

 

* * *

 

“Dance with me,” Yuri says, before his mind can catch up to his mouth and tell him it’s yet another Stupid Idea.

“I think,” Otabek tells him, leaning forward to peer into his eyes, “you’re a little high.”

Otabek is smiling, speaking slowly, the way you do to a small child or someone whose faculties of higher thinking are temporarily impaired, but he’s not. Yakov let him have exactly half a glass of champagne after dinner, which he’d knocked back in two seconds and called “kid stuff.” This isn’t anywhere close to drunk; it’s just that all night he’s had the music under his skin, reverberating all the way down into the core of him, echoing forever. And if he doesn’t find a way to shake it off _right this minute_ —preferably one that involves Otabek and that alluring circle of empty space opening up in the middle of the dance floor—he might very well explode.

“What are you going to do about it?”

He doesn’t _quite_ catch the moment Otabek’s jacket somehow slips from his shoulders and ends up on the back of his chair, but that’s impossible, because he knows, he _knows_ he hasn’t been able to tear his eyes away. Then Otabek is walking past him, rolling up his sleeves as he goes, and there’s no _time_ to think about anything else but racing to catch up.

 

* * *

 

Yuri’s skates are half on his feet and still unlaced, but he’s distracted by his lock-screen, staring too long at the clock. It’s lunchtime in Almaty, right about now.

“You can call him before you go in, if you want.” Victor grins from the opposite bench, half-bent over as he pulls his own laces taut. “I’ll tell Yakov you ate something bad for breakfast.”

It’s nearly Yuri’s phone that goes hurtling through the air toward his head, but at the last moment he catches himself—reaches for one of his sneakers instead, pulls his arm back as far as it will go, and lets fly.

 

* * *

 

The big finish, at the end of the gala—

Yuri exits the ice at full speed.

Meaning, he forgets to check his momentum at the entry door. Meaning, his blades leave the ice and make contact with the floor and he keeps going, tangled up in his own windmilling arms and legs until Otabek steps into his path.

“Did you see me?” No breath left in him to speak and Otabek’s hands caging his wrists but the question is urgent enough to find its way out of him anyway. His hair is a mess and he already knows the kohl Georgi smeared around his eyes an hour ago is melting in sweaty streaks, but all these things are immaterial, he needs to _know._

“Everyone saw you, Yuri,” Otabek says. He’s carrying Yuri’s jacket in the crook of his arm, and once he’s made sure Yuri’s feet are planted steadily he lets him go, reaching around to drape it over his shoulders. “Everyone in the world.”

“That’s not what I was asking,” Yuri says, grinning, wild, even as he hooks his fingers in the sparkling lapels and tugs the jacket closer around himself.

 

* * *

 

The next time Yuri’s blades touch the ice at St. Petersburg he feels the shift in the way he breathes.

Objectively, nothing about the practice rink _looks_ different, so he concludes it must be his eyes that have changed. Suddenly all that sky. Suddenly all the light in the windows, as though every sheet of glass wants to promise him something more.

 

* * *

 

 Yakov doesn’t rub elbows much with the other skaters, but there’s this _look_ he gives Otabek, one morning at the breakfast buffet. No words, just a furrowed brow and a glare fit to burn holes in the carpet.  Yuri knows that look—the sizing-up look, the watch-yourself-sir look, the boys-like-you look, the crown of his head reddening to flame with the intensity of it.

“Good morning,” Otabek says, like cold water, ceding both the plate in his hand and his place in line with an obliging gesture. _Please go before me._

He winks at Yuri two seconds later, after Yakov’s back is turned.

 

* * *

 

It’s easy to tell when Yuuri’s gotten off the phone with Phichit. He fidgets less, smiles more, moves like his skin fits him just that little bit better than it did an hour ago.

“But what do you even _talk_ about?” Yuri mutters, all barbed and sour. In the back of his mind he’s praying Yuuri doesn’t hear the envy—Phichit is four hours ahead instead of three, but he might as well just be down the street for how easy it seems to be for Yuuri to reach for him across the distance that divides them. Yuri himself is painfully slow to hit the dial button even in emergency situations; he’s always hated the obtrusiveness of phone calls, the time and effort and attention they demand. All his life he’s been hard-pressed to imagine something—or someone—that might be worth it.

(He’ll admit to being slightly affronted that Yuuri, for all his crippling anxiety about too many other things to name, doesn’t feel the same. Or, rather, _does_ feel the same, except around two or three people around whom he feels no less than entirely at home in himself—which makes all the difference.)

“Anything,” Yuuri says, smiling. “Sometimes nothing in particular.”

 

* * *

 

It’s not even four hours after the medaling ceremony that they’re back on the ice again.

They’re not supposed to be here, strictly speaking. They’re supposed to be having dinner. Resting. Winding down in preparation for the gala tomorrow. But the long and short of it is that on the way to dinner Yuri had been seized by a Stupid Idea—“Want to see something cool?”—and now here they are, taking each other through exhibition routines they’re going to be able to watch again in less than twenty-four hours anyway.

It’s practice, Yuri tells himself. They’re putting each other through their paces. More importantly _,_ though he knows he should be running nearly on empty after today the rush from this afternoon’s victory feeds him, he’s been hiding this knee-slide at the end up his sleeve for _months,_ and he’s not about to pass up more chances to get it absolutely perfect.

Otabek puts his hand up, thumb cocked, before Yuri makes the full stop. “Bang,” he says.

_Bang._

The music cuts out, shrill sliding guitar licks crackling down into silence. Yuri rises onto his knees—then bends forward, doubled over, laughing. “Bang,” he repeats, between gasps. “ _Bang._ You’re such an ass.”

“You should do that for me tomorrow,” he adds, accepting Otabek’s hand up from the ice just this once. He’s still got tears in his eyes, and a stitch running all up one side from the effort. “Rinkside. Will you?”

It’s important that Yuri not laugh too long, or too loud, where anyone else can hear him. Or make too many jokes. He has a reputation to uphold, after all. He’s been careful about that, all his life, dead-set on it.

He doesn’t know, not yet, how to say that this is different. Or that that wasn’t a joke, at least not all of it.

“Of course,” Otabek says, without even stopping to think.

(Otabek lets him pay for dinner, when they finally get to it. This is arguably a harder-fought victory than even the gold medal, and Yuri holds it close.)

 

* * *

  

The time difference—three hours, nothing to cry about—he gets used to easily. The other voices on the other end of the line—two little sisters, a chatty mother, innumerable nosy friends with a bad habit of asking _Is this him—_ he learns to live with, after the first three weeks. But the music—Otabek’s music is something else. It slips through the wires and lingers all around Yuri, fills up his entire room. It tiptoes right behind him as he walks through the house, even if he never remembers to ask what the songs are called.

The music stays in his head, even after they hang up. Some nights he falls asleep to it without meaning to, and finds it waiting when he wakes up.

 

* * *

 

There is a moment nobody sees, when Yuri mounts the podium and sees it become a tower. He pulls himself upright and the world pitches, side to side, everything he can see dropping away from around him into empty air. No grips, no ground on which to stand—nothing but these smallest steps across the knife’s edge, alone.

It’s not enough to say this is all he wanted. He thinks of Otabek, the ceiling lights radiant as stars on his face as he had turned to look up at the scoreboard, so close they seemed to crown him—and then he had turned toward Yuri and smiled, had bent his head almost in reverence.

It had felt like a vision to watch him then. Like hunger, like truth.

Now under the eyes of the world Yuri, too, bows—the way you might in prayer, or before a dance. The medal loops over his head and swings down, coming to rest against the soft place between his ribs, turning in the light with every breath.

 

* * *

 

 Deep winter in St. Petersburg, and Victor Nikiforov still drives with the top down.

He offers to treat them all to dinner on Thursday, for no reason other than that “it’s nice to be together again, isn’t it?”—and because there’s really only one answer to that question Yuri finds himself squeezed in the back of Victor’s car half an hour later, with Mila’s gym bag in his lap and Georgi’s too-long legs knocking his knees together with no concern at all for space. Katsuki Yuuri, of course, has the honor of shotgun, and it goes without saying that Victor’s hand is in his hand every millisecond it’s not on the gearshift.

It’s after rush hour when they get out onto the main road, so Yuri can tip his face upwards and watch the wind blowing the stars around. Needlepoints on his face and claws in his hair, spreading the cold from forehead to fingertips, and he glories in it.

“He-ey,” Mila sings in his ear, laughing and elbowing him in the side when he snaps his head around to glare at her. “Look at you, so far away.”

She’s not wrong. They may all be flying, but he’s headed somewhere else.

 

* * *

  

In the beginning that everyone assumes is the real beginning, there’s a motorcycle, and a question.

Yuri knows that later people will talk—are already talking—but he holds his tongue, just this once. There’s no way to explain this _yes_ that won’t diminish it. The best he can do is this: when someone calls your name, you rise, and go.

 

* * *

  

Yuri finds the MP3 sitting in his email inbox when he gets home. He knows the song from the first riff—they’ve batted the idea back and forth a few times, always kind of as a joke, but less and less so every time it comes back—but he’s not prepared to hear the new heartbeat Otabek has given it, the shattering electric pulse. It’s a song that breathes, like some great, restless, dreaming animal. It’s one that speaks.

So this is what a fresh pair of hands can do, he thinks.

On the desk next to his keyboard, Yuri’s phone lights up. Quicker than he can think about anything else he reaches for it, as though every cell in his body has been waiting, tensed to close that distance—even if he finds he knows what he’ll see. He can already hear the words.

_That one’s for you._

**Author's Note:**

> postscript: I know Georgi didn't technically come to Spain because he was too busy going on dates back in Mother Russia, but there is no other human being my imagination will allow to take responsibility for Yuri's EX eye makeup, so here we are


End file.
